


los renacidos

by therm0dynamics



Series: everybody wants to rule the world [3]
Category: Narcos (TV)
Genre: Dark Character, Dark fic, Gen, POV Outsider, POV Second Person, everything is the same except everybody is a bad guy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-14 19:24:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15395715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therm0dynamics/pseuds/therm0dynamics
Summary: You’ve heard about what they’ve done.Los verdugos.The butchers, the beasts. The three of them, together, over the years, have become a force that very few in the city — in the world, even — would dare challenge anymore.





	los renacidos

**Author's Note:**

> i had the terrible urge to write a fic where the good guys are the bad guys, and uh, here we are, pretentiousness and all. lmao. general warning for canon-typical violence.

You’re young and you’re dirt-poor and you have a family to care for, so you know exactly what to do when, late one summer night, when the glow of sunset still lights up the sky, two men with assault rifles and balaclavas pulled over their faces burst into your squalid tenement and motion for you and your screaming wife and crying children to keep quiet.

You _keep quiet_ , and you listen to the chase continue in a storm of yelling, heavy footsteps, baying dogs, and a clatter of gunfire in the distance that you can pretend is just thunder over the mountains. Someone knocks at your door and you point them purposely in the wrong direction, deeper into the maze-like slums, all too aware of the two men sitting in your bedroom, waiting, your wife and child locked in with them. When all quiets down again, they salute you and melt back into the humid choking darkness like they never were there at all.

In your area of the city, in this area of the world, these things happen as certainly as the sun rises or the rain falls, but your wife cries all night like she doesn’t know this.

You also know what to do when the next day, the two men — one with eyes black as night, the other, surprisingly, a blue-eyed _gringo_ — come back with gifts for you. A gun, a two-way radio, and the open back door of a car, engine idling and the driver looking at you expectantly. You accept these gifts and leave with them, of course, because you’ve seen too much already, and you know what they will do to you if you refuse. Besides. You’re young, and dirt-poor, and have a family to care for, and your only other choice is to keep begging for work on the streets. If you go with these men, at least you die on your feet, with food in your belly, money in your pocket.

You only realize when you arrive at the mansion far up in the mountains exactly whose men you sheltered the night before. Horacio Carrillo steps out of the shadows to greet you.

You’ve heard the stories, of course. It’s impossible not to know who he is. In your area of the city. In this area of the world. The CNP officer betrayed one time too many by the system he’d worked for, his family slaughtered, the sideways descent, the rebirth into a man as good at being one of the _narcos_ as he was at catching them. He still has that policeman’s ramrod walk and wears the policeman’s uniform, but the fire in his eyes is all ambition, and violence, and death.

So the two you’d saved, and your saviors in return, must be his attack dogs — Javier Peña and Steve Murphy. Ex-DEA. Sent to Colombia to help Carillo hunt the _narcos_ , then disavowed and exiled by their country for what they’d had to do in that mission. And then, like everyone else in this godforsaken place, transformed by the jungle darkness into the truest versions of themselves. This place turned you into a pathetic mangy cur, cringing and groveling just for food to eat. It turned _these_ three men into things that hunt and kill creatures like you for sport.

You’ve heard about what they’ve done. _Los verdugos._ The butchers, the beasts. The three of them, together, over the years, have become a force that very few in the city — in the world, even — would dare challenge anymore.

“What’s your name?” Carrillo asks.

“Santiago,” you say. After Saint James the Greater, who, after a lifetime of being blind and deaf to your pleas, has apparently seen fit to help you out after all. This is the best place someone like you could have ended up in. With them, by their side, on their side. Because God forbid you’re against them.

“Santo, welcome,” says Javier Peña, and claps you on the shoulder like an old friend. Steve Murphy smiles like how a knife cuts. The _gringo dorado_ , someone even Carrillo can’t control. He supposedly only listens to Javier Peña, and from the way he and Peña look at each other, and how they always seem to know each other’s thoughts and move together, two as one — well, you can understand some of the things they say about these two. The kinds of things they only say very quietly, under their breath.

The best, or maybe worst, part of hearing all these stories is finding out in the months that follow that they’re all true.

You get to watch Horacio Carrillo maneuver his troops, and Javier Peña hunt men down and Steve Murphy dismember them. You watch Javier Peña line up rows of men against the walls of every neighborhood in Medellín, and shoot them all down like cutting puppets from their strings. You watch Steve Murphy strangle a traitorous informant to death with his bare hands, silent and smiling the entire time, blood bright and stark on his fair skin and blonde hair. You watch Carrillo, his eyes calm and blank and flat, torture a spy captured from a rival cartel, and you’re the one who breaks first, even before the spy does.

You learn all the weak spots in a human body where the blade of a knife will fit — that’s Carrillo, precise and clean as a surgeon — the taste of blood in the air, the taste of the barrel of a gun in your mouth, the weight of a body, the smell of rotting flesh under the hot midday sun compared to in the wet dark of midnight. You learn how a man screams when his throat is being ripped out by someone else’s teeth — that’s Murphy doing the deed, of course, his smirking mouth shining with red, and even Javier Peña looks a little unsettled. You learn the names and faces of the legions of corrupt cops and politicians going in and out the door, like there’s not an honest man or woman left in Colombia. The president goes on TV and makes promises he can’t keep. You’re not there when he gets gunned down right on the steps of the National Courthouse, but Javier Peña was, and he tells you about it over a glass of the best whiskey you’ve ever had. Steve Murphy tells you stories about America that you definitely think are all bullshit, but you don’t tell him that because he’s always been the nicest to you, and because he’s the one who scares you the most.

In return, you drive them where they need to go. You bury the bodies where nobody will find them. You kill who they tell you to. You eat their food, you wear their clothes, and you take their money. Blood money. In time, you order their men around — your men now. You’ve earned that right. You’ve risen, one step closer to being whatever _they_ are. Gods. Demons. Your wife and children have stopped looking you in the eye, and you can’t quite meet their furtive stares either, but at least they don’t go hungry. You stop sleeping at night. When you do, you dream of clotted blood and bloated corpses with their eyes wide open. You learn exactly what people are capable of, what you yourself are capable of, when it’s money and glory at stake.

You hurt, you get hurt, and then one day it all catches up to you like you knew it would, and suddenly you’re bleeding out in some slum in Medellín, gutshot twice through the stomach, getting blood all over Javier Peña’s shirt and hands as Steve Murphy loads his pistol, takes aim over the wall you’re hiding behind, and with three well-placed shots, avenges your death.

You think of your family, but Javier Peña is already telling you it’s okay, they’ll be okay, he’ll personally make sure of it. And they save you again by putting a bullet through your neck. An act of mercy, because you’ve seen the ways a death can be dragged out. How tedious and excruciating it can be. And in your very last minutes you imagine a biblical rainstorm lashing down, washing the mountains bare down to the rocks. Drowning this rotting country run by men turned animals turned monsters. Or maybe it’s all past saving. Maybe it was never worth it in the first place. You wonder if those three wonder where they’ll go after they die. You don’t wonder at all. You already know. And for the first time since that summer night in your kitchen, you don’t feel afraid at all.  


**Author's Note:**

> .... don't look at me. hope you enjoyed this, let me know what you think!


End file.
